Dusty Hill Says There’s a ‘Good Chance’ of Another ZZ Top Album

ZZ Top celebrated their 50th anniversary with a compilation that included some long-vaulted tracks from their earliest days. But their last studio album came out in 2012. Still, bassist Dusty Hill is optimistic that La Futura is not the last music you'll hear from the band.

In fact, he tells UCR "there’s a good chance" ZZ Top will release another album. "We’ve got a lot in the can," he says. "It depends on how we would want to put it together or redo it or whatever. Because it’s years of stuff. We just record everything, and then we go, 'Well, no, this didn’t quite feel right, right now.'

"Since we did our own writing for so long, we’ll start writing a song, and one piece will kind of start standing out on its own and that turns into a separate song. So the original song was good, but we just discarded it to go on with the other one. Suffice to say, we’ve got a lot in the can and we keep talking about it."

Since La Futura, singer and guitarist Billy Gibbons has released two solo records, 2015's Perfectamundo and last year's The Big Bad Blues, and he's planning a third as a tribute to his longtime friend, late producer Joe Hardy. But Gibbons said he hasn't given up on his main gig. While he was tracking The Big Bad Blues, Hill and drummer Frank Beard were in another studio in the same building working on what they called "a few ZZ Top starter pieces."

This, Gibbons said, gave him "a sense of great confidence [in] the possibility of making something new within the framework of something that is trustable and repeatable: the ZZ Top thing.”